Reframing immobility: young women aspiring to ‘good enough’ local futures

ABSTRACT

Mobility is high on the agenda in both policy and research and being mobile is a positive descriptor, not least for young people. The downside of the focus and value placed on mobility as the path to success is that ‘immobility’ has clear, negative associations: being immobile equals being ‘stuck’, a ‘failure’ and not being aspirational. In this paper I seek to problematise dominant representations of decisions to stay in regional and rural locations as ‘immobility’ that indicates a lack of aspiration or agency. More specifically, by exploring how the participants in this study negotiate belonging and aspiration in ways that are both classed and gendered, the paper contributes to more nuanced representations of the lives of young people living outside of urban spaces. The paper is based on a qualitative study of the everyday lives and imagined futures of young women with interrupted formal education, focusing on a disadvantaged location in regional Victoria, Australia.

KEYWORDS:

• Mobility
• place
• gender
• aspiration
• belonging

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I use the term ‘region/regional’ as this is the commonly used terminology in Australia. The Australian Bureau of Statistics use a 5-tiered ‘remoteness structure’ to classify geographical areas in terms of their distance to services. The five groups include major cities, inner regional, outer regional, remote and very remote Australia. I ‘collapse’ inner and outer regional into the category ‘regional’ to preserve anonymity. https://www.abs.gov.au/websitedbs/D3310114.nsf/home/remoteness±structure.

2 Australia’s teenage fertility rate is comparable to the UK, US and Canada, while significantly higher than European countries (Hoffman and Vidal 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [grant number DE170100613].